It is widely believed that Twin-Earth-style thought experiments show that the contents of a person's thoughts fail to supervene on her intrinsic properties. Several recent philosophers have made the further claim that Twin-Earth-style thought experiments produce metaphysically necessary conditions for the possession of certain concepts. I argue that the latter view is false, and produce counterexamples to several proposed conditions. My thesis is of particular interest because it undermines some attempts to show that externalism is incompatible with privileged access.

I aim to show that a semantic minimalist need not also be a semantic internalist. §I introduces minimalism and internalism and argues that there is a prima facie case for a minimalist being an internalist. §II sketches some positive arguments for internalism which, if successful, show that a minimalist must be an internalist. §III goes on to reject these arguments and contends that the prima facie case for uniting minimalism and internalism is also not compelling. §IV returns to an objection (...) from §I and argues for a way to meet it which does not depend on giving up semantic externalism. (shrink)

Semantic externalism in contemporary philosophy of language typically – and often tacitly – combines two supervenience claims about idiolectical meaning (i.e., meaning in the language system of an individual speaker). The first claim is that the meaning of a word in a speaker’s idiolect may vary without any variation in her intrinsic, physical properties. The second is that the meaning of a word in a speaker’s idiolect may vary without any variation in her understanding of its use. I here show (...) that a conception of idiolectical meaning is possible that accepts the “anti-internalism” of the first claim while rejecting (what I shall refer to as) the “anti-individualism” of the second. According to this conception, externally constituted idiolectical meaning supervenes on idiolectical understanding. (shrink)

In this paper I challenge recent externalist interpretations of Ockham’s theory of intuitive cognition. I begin by distinguishing two distinct theses that defenders of the externalist interpretation typically attribute to Ockham: a ‘direct reference thesis’, according to which intuitive cognitions are states that lack all internal, descriptive content; and a ‘causal thesis’, according to which intuitive states are wholly determined by causal connections they bear to singular objects. I then argue that neither can be plausibly credited to Ockham. In particular, (...) I claim that the causal thesis doesn’t square with Ockham’s account of supernaturally produced intuition and that the direct reference thesis sits uneasily with Ockham’s characterization of the intentional structure of intuitive states. (shrink)

Can we believe things that could not possibly be true? The world seems full of examples. Mathematicians have "proven" theorems which in fact turn out to be false. People have believed that Hesperus is not Phosphorus, that they themselves are essentially incorporeal, that heat is not molecular motion--all propositions which have been claimed to be not just false, but necessarily false. Some have even seemed to pride themselves on believing the impossible; Hegel thought contradictions could be true, and Kierkegaard seems (...) to have thought that Christianity, in which he fervently believed, was impossible and absurd. (shrink)

SummaryExternalism in philosophy of mind is usually taken to be faced with the following difficulty: from the fact that meanings are externally individuated, it follows that the subjective character of mental states and events becomes problematic. On the basis of a well‐founded approach to similar problems in the philosophy of action, I propose a solution based on two connected issues: we should think of mental states not as beliefs, but as states of knowledge, and thought experiments, designed to strip off (...) the contribution of the world from the subject's contribution to the contents of his mental states, are doomed to fail. The allegedly subjective character of propositional contentful states is that they are agent‐specific states. Agent‐specificity is not in contradiction with mental states or intentional actions having a circumstantial nature. (shrink)

Borg (2009) surveys and rejects a number of arguments in favour of semantic internalism. This paper, in turn, surveys and rejects all of Borg's anti-internalist arguments. My chief moral is that, properly conceived, semantic internalism is a methodological doctrine that takes its lead from current practice in linguistics. The unifying theme of internalist arguments, therefore, is that linguistics neither targets nor presupposes externalia. To the extent that this claim is correct, we should be internalists about linguistic phenomena, including semantics.

In this paper, I credit Quine with having implicitly held a view I had long urged on him: externalism. Quine was the first fully to recognize that all there is to meaning is what we learn or absorb from observed usage. This entails the possibility of indeterminacy, thus destroying the myth of meanings. It also entails a powerful form of externalism. There is, of course, a counter-current in Quine's work of the mid century: the idea of stimulus meaning. Attractive as (...) this choice of empirical base is compared to such options as sense data, appearances, and percepts, it has serious difficulties. In general, an externalism which ties the contents of observation sentences and perceptual beliefs directly to the sorts of situations that usually make them true is superior to those forms of empiricism which introduce intermediaries between word and object. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to show that there is one version of supervenience of the mental on the physical which is entailed by token-token identity (I call this version change-supervenience); and to establish that of the other better known versions of supervenience in the literature (which I call difference-supervenience), none are so entailed. One consequence of this is that Burge's thought experiments while successful in refuting difference-supervenience cannot in themselves refute identity thesis. However, the introduction of change (...) supervenience leads me to devise an analogous thought experiment against change-supervenience, thus refuting identity thesis as well. (shrink)

Content externalism is the dominant view in the philosophy of mind. Content essentialism, the thesis that thought tokens have their contents essentially, is also popular. And many externalists are supporters of such essentialism. However, endorsing the conjunction of those views either (i) commits one to a counterintuitive view of the underlying physical nature of thought tokens or (ii) commits one to a slightly different but still counterintuitive view of the relation of thought tokens to physical tokens as well as a (...) rejection of realist physicalism. In this essay I reveal the problem and articulate and adjudicate among the possible solutions. I will end up rejecting content essentialism. (shrink)

Tyler Burge's critique of individualistic conceptions of mental content is well known.This paper employs a novel strategy to defend a strong form of Burge's conclusion. The division of epistemic labor rests on the possibility of language-mediated transactions, such as asking for something in a store and getting it. The paper shows that any individualistic conception of content will render such transactions unintelligible.

In this paper, I challenge a widely presupposed principle in the epistemology of inference. The principle, (Validity Requirement), is this: S’s (purportedly deductive) reasoning, R, from warranted premise-beliefs provides (conditional) warrant for S’s belief in its conclusion only if R is valid. I argue against (Validity Requirement) from two prominent assumptions in the philosophy of mind: that the cognitive competencies that constitute reasoning are fallible, and that the attitudes operative in reasoning are anti-individualistically individuated. Indeed, my discussion will amount to (...) a defence of anti-individualism against a novel ‘slow-switch’ argument against it. This argument contra anti-individualism has it that given anti-individualism and certain auxiliary assumptions, A, a switched reasoner may, in certain slow-switch circumstances, C, reason invalidly by equivocating concepts. More specifically: -/- (Valid 0): Peter is in circumstances C, and auxiliary assumptions, A, hold.(Valid 1): If Peter is in circumstances C, and auxiliary assumptions A hold, then (if the attitudes operative in Peter’s reasoning R are anti-individualistically individuated, then R is not valid). (Valid 2): Peter’s reasoning, R, generates warrant for the conclusion-belief. (Valid 3): Peter’s reasoning, R, generates warrant for the conclusion-belief only if the reasoning, R, is valid. (Valid 4): So, the attitudes operative in Peter’s reasoning R are not anti-individualistically individuated. -/- The argument involves weaker premises than those of familiar slow-switch arguments against anti-individualism. In particular, it requires only that the reasoning be de facto valid. This assumption is much weaker than the requirement that the validity of the reasoning be ‘transparent’ to the reasoner. Indeed, (Valid 3) is simply an instance of (Validity Requirement). However, I argue that anti-individualism and (Valid 0)–(Valid 2) should be upheld at the expense of (Valid 3). In consequence, (Validity Requirement) stands in need of restriction. Thus, I argue for a surprising result in the epistemology of inference from widely accepted assumptions in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

There is widespread suspicion that there is a principled conflict between epistemic internalism and content externalism (or anti-individualism). Despite the prominence of this suspicion, it has rarely been substantiated by explicit arguments. However, Duncan Pritchard and Jesper Kallestrup have recently provided a prima facie argument concluding that internalism about knowledge and externalism about content are incompatible. I criticize the incompatibilist argument and conclude that the purported incompatibility is, at best, prima facie. This is, in part, because several steps in the (...) argument are faulty and, in part, because there are promising responses available to the compatibilists. (shrink)

It is often presupposed that an anti-individualist about representational mental states must choose between two accounts of no-reference cases. One option is said to be an ‘illusion of thought’ version according to which the subject in a no-reference case fails to think a first-order thought but rather has the illusion of having one. The other is a ‘descriptive’ version according to which one thinks an empty thought via a description. While this presupposition is not uncommon, it rarely surfaces in an (...) explicit manner. Often, it is visible only when a theorist argues directly from the falsity of one of the two views to the truth of the other. However, Jessica Brown’s recent work on anti-individualism clearly illustrates the presupposition. In contention with Brown’s and others presupposition, arguments for two conclusions about the nature of anti-individualism are set forth. First, the choice between the illusion and descriptive version of anti-individualism is a dilemma. Each version of anti-individualism is prone to problems. Second, the choice is a false dilemma. There is another, less problematic, anti-individualistic account of reference failure. (shrink)

Our fundamental conception of the self seems to be, broadly speaking, epistemic: selves are things that have thoughts, undergo experiences, and possess reasons for action and belief. In this paper, I evaluate the consequences of this epistemic conception for the widespread view that properties like thinking that arthritis is painful are relational features of the self.

Davidson has attempted to integrate externalism into his account of meaning and understanding. He contends that what words mean is fixed in part by the circumstances in which they were learnt, in which the basic connection between words and things is established. This connection is allegedly established by causal interaction between people and the world. Words and sentences derive their meanings from the objects and circumstances in which they were learnt, which.

It is widely held that the meaning of certain types of terms, such as natural kind terms, is individuated externalistically, in terms of the individual's external environment. Recently a more radical thesis has emerged, a thesis we dub 'a posteriori semantics.' The suggestion is that not only does a term's meaning depend on the external environment, but so does its semantics. One motivation for this is the aim to account for cases where a putative natural kind term fails to pick (...) out a natural kind: The term may have a standard externalist semantics (if it picks out a natural kind) or a more descriptivist one (if it does not). Knowing which semantics applies will therefore require detailed empirical knowledge. This move has also been employed in cases where a singular term, such as a name, fails to have a reference. We argue that a posteriori semantics is inherently implausible, since the type of semantics common terms should be given ought not to be conditional on details of chemistry or physics. A number of difficulties for the position—'metaphysical,' epistemological, and methodological—are articulated. Finally, we suggest that a posteriori semantics misconstrues the way in which semantics is empirical. (shrink)

Semantic externalism about a class of expressions is often thought to make conceptual analysis about members of that class impossible. In particular, since externalism about natural kind terms makes the essences of natural kinds empirically discoverable, it seems that mere reflection on one's natural kind concept will not be able to tell one anything substantial about what it is for something to fall under one's natural kind concepts. Many hold the further view that one cannot even know anything substantial about (...) the reference-fixers of one's natural kind concepts by armchair reflection. In this paper I want to question this latter view and claim that, because of the way our standard methodology of doing theories of reference relies on semantic intuitions, typical externalists in fact presuppose that one can know the reference-fixers of one's natural kind concepts by mere armchair reflection. The more interesting question is how substantial such knowledge can be. I also take some steps toward answering this question. (shrink)

According to ‘internalism’, what mental states people are in depends wholly on what obtains inside their heads. This paper challenges that view without relying on arguments about the identity‐conditions of concepts that make up the content of mental states. Instead, it questions the internalist’s underlying assumption that, in Searle’s words, “the brain is all we have for the purpose of representing the world to ourselves”, which neglects the fact that human beings have used their brains to devise methods for extending (...) and enhancing the brain’s own functions, in particular for storing information externally. Although Popper draws attention to this fact, he fails to grasp its psychological implications, concluding instead that there can be knowledge “without a knowing subject”, and so repeating the internalist’s mistake. With equal justice one can conclude, absurdly, that there are ownerless plans, resolutions and shopping‐lists. The paper goes on to meet possible internalist counter‐arguments. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that content externalism can provide the foundations of an argument against the traditional epistemological skeptic. I maintain that if such an argument is available, it seems there is also an a priori argument against the possibility of a creationist god. My suspicion is that such a strong consequence is not desirable for the content-externalists, and that the availability of this argument therefore casts doubt on the anti-skeptical position. I argue that all content externalists should be troubled by (...) this result, since even those philosophers who do not endorse the anti-skeptical strategy must either reject the possibility of a creationist god or admit that their thesis does not hold a priori for minds in general. (shrink)

While engaged in the analysis of topics such as the nature of knowledge, meaning, or justice, analytic philosophers have traditionally relied extensively on their own intuitions about when the relevant terms can, and can't, be correctly applied. Consequently, if intuitions about possible cases turned out not to be a reliable tool for the proper analysis of philosophically central concepts, then a radical reworking of philosophy's (or at least analytic philosophy's) methodology would seem to be in order. It is thus not (...) surprising that the increasingly critical scrutiny that intuitions have received of late has produced what has been referred to as a "crisis" in analytic philosophy. This paper will argue, however, that at least those criticisms that stem from recent work on semantic externalism are not as serious as their proponents have claimed. Indeed, this paper will argue while the conceptual intuitions (and the analyses that result from them) will have to be recognized as fallible, they still have a prima facie claim to correctness. A naturalistic and externalistic account of concepts thus merely requires that the methodology of conceptual analysis be reinterpreted (from a 'Platonic' to a 'constructive' model) rather than given up. (shrink)

In my Magisterarbeit I argue for a concept empiristic revision of many core problems and conceptualized questions of philosophy and cognitive science ((e.g. meaning, intentionality, ontology of mental states, the frame problem and context sensitivity, the role of consciousness for action and conceptual processing, etc.) and try to position Concept Empiricism as a viable substitute for the langue centred analytic paradigm in philosophy and cognitive science. By Concept Empiricism I understood a position which is slightly similar to the philosophical Concept (...) Empiricism of Jesse Prinz (2002, 2005). However, my position differs from that position in many respects: At its core are theories from Grounded Cognition/Embodied Grounding, especially Lawrence Barsalou’s (1999) Perceptual Symbol Systems Theory. Further important theories and positions are the Johnson-Lakoff Programme (Lakoff and Johnson 1999), the concept and understanding theory of Gallese and Lakoff (2005), Michael Spivey’s (2007) and Walter Freeman’s (1999) dynamic approaches to cognition, the mechanistic explanation framework from philosophy of science of Bechtel (2008) and Wimsatt (2006), Machamer et al. (2000) as well as Cummins (2000) and Harnad’s (1990) and Searle’s (1980) thoughts about intentionality. The main thought to which my Magisterarbeit is committed is the view that human concepts are structure-functionally embodied, especially in neuronal structures responsible for vision, audition, movement, emotions, etc. This means that the content or meaning of these concepts is not arbitrary as it is in many common views which comprehend of concepts as functional symbols only realized by the brain (cf. Fodor 1975). The very content of concepts is given by the structure of the areas in the brain in which these concepts are simulated, i.e. concepts are simulations of areas in the brain which are normally dedicated to sensori-motor and emotional functions (cf. Barsalou 1999). Another essential feature of this view is that concepts are not language like, but more like perceptual or emotional events, which was my main reason to call the view I presented in my Magisterarbeit Concept Empiricism. Here I mainly relied on the already existing theories of Barsalou (1999) and Gallese and Lakoff (2005) and contributed only by means of some minor conceptual clarifications and phenomenological explications. Further foundational work dealt with an attack on philosophical functionalism (cf. Putnam 1967). Here I proposed an alternative to functionalistic computational and information processing frameworks: Simulation (Barsalou 1999) and neuronal exploitation (Gallese and Lakoff 2005). Besides presenting these core foundational principles I attacked the viability of functionalism against the background of the symbol grounding problem (Harnad 1990), the Chinese room problem (Searle 1980), and diverse other problems. Having done this foundational work I concentrated on the both main topics of the Magisterarbeit, meaning and intentionality. Here I criticized the more common philosophical approaches to meaning, especially the naturalized ones of Fodor (1987, 1990), Millikan (2004), Papineau (1993), the reference theories of Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1975) and usage based approaches as that of Wittgenstein (1953). I argued for a theory which is based on imagery (not comparable to the term of Kosslyn et al. (2006), but more a presentational term functionally defined in my Magistearbeit) and backed by phenomenological as well as empirical evidence. The result was a theory which diverges strongly from philosophical common sense in that it favours meaning internalism instead of externalism, sees meaning as private instead of public, as non-normative and above all, non-linguistic. I also proposed solutions to context sensitivity and the frame problem (especially by means of integrating a sensori-motor view of concepts into complex braindynamics), explanations of abstractness, communication of meanings and the relation of meaning and the world via concrete intentionality instead of classic abstract reference relations. I tried to explain intentionality as an emergent property of the whole cognitive system in its relation to the world. This means that intentionality emerges naturally from the cognitive architecture proposed earlier: The proposed conceptual system and its relation to our senses (our most direct way of engaging with the world) in the interaction with the world provides intentionality “for free”; instead of proposing ad hoc explanations (or better: descriptions) like e.g. Fodor (1990) or Prinz (2002). Intentionality, as I conceive of it in my Magisterarbeit, is concrete, which means that it is only realized in cases of perception and action and based on a statistical and discrete, potentially quantifiable pattern-mapping mechanism. I then contrasted this version of intentionality from more common conceptions and developed twelve distinct points of criticism of them. I further criticized more common approaches for being primarily interested in an objective ontology and epistemology and for being guilty of embedding a full blown metaphysics into semantics. Following that, I proceeded by engaging into a discussion about the ontology of mental states, where I criticized the idea of multiple realizability (cf. Fodor 1974) and where I developed an ontology of mental states which is primarily based on epistemic principles from the philosophy of science: i.e. mental mechanisms (cf. Bechtel 2008), the Heuristic Identity Theory (cf. Bechtel and McCauley 1999), the concept of productive continuity (cf. Machamer et al. 2000) and Cummins (2000) description-explanation distinction. I argued that the mechanisms which I delineated above suffice these principles, but that ontological positions like functionalism or its more recent relative, the extended mind hypothesis (cf. Clark and Chalmers 1998), do not suffice these principles. I concluded these thoughts with phenomenological considerations of the kind that instead engaging into metaphysical discussions we should replace an ontology of mental states by a phenomenology of the mental which is in accord with the view of meaning delineated at the beginning of my Magisterarbeit. Subsequently I discussed common arguments against non-functionalist and imaginistic theories, primarily from Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988) and Machery who assembled a plethora of counter arguments in (Machery 2007). I concluded that none of the arguments marshalled against my version of Concept Empiricism is viable and that Concept Empiricism seems to be the paradigm most supported by empirical studies and phenomenological considerations. Because of the high degree of density of my thesis I delineate here only the coarse grained orientation of it and do not reconstruct single arguments in detail. I hope that the reader shows understanding for this and refers to the Magisterarbeit itself, when she is more interested in argumentative detail. -/- References Barsalou, L. (1999): Perceptual Symbol Systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, (4), 577-609. Bechtel, W. (2008): Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive neuroscience. London: Routledge. Bechtel, W. and McCauley, R. (1999): Heuristic Identity Theory (or Back to the Future): The Mind-Body Problem Against the Background of Research Strategies in Cognitive Neuroscience. In: Hahn, M. and Stoness, S. (eds.): Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Clark, A. and Chalmers, D. (1998): The Extended Mind. Analysis, 58, (1), 7-19. Cummins, R. (2000): “How Does it Work?" vs. "What Are the laws?": Two Conceptions of Psychological Explanation. In: Keil, F. and Wilson, R. (eds.). Explanation and Cognition. Cambridge: MIT Press. Fodor, J. (1974): Special Sciences. Synthese, 28, 97-115. Fodor, J. (1975): The Language of Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Fodor J. (1987): Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press. Fodor, J. (1990): A Theory of Content and Other Essays: Cambridge: MIT Press. Fodor, J. and Pylyshyn, Z. (1988): Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis. In: http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/pub/papers/jaf.pdf Freeman, W. (1999): How Brains make up their Minds. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Gallese, V. and Lakoff, G. (2005): The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-Motor System in Reason and Language. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22, (3), 455-479. Harnad, S. (1990): The Symbol Grounding Problem. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 42, 335-346. Kosslyn, S., Thompson, W. and Ganis, G. (2006): The Case for Mental Imagery. New York: Oxford University Press. Kripke, S. (1972): Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999): Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books. Machamer, P., Darden, L. and Craver, C. (2000): Thinking About Mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67, 1-25. Machery, E. (2007): Concept Empiricism: A Methodological Critique. Cognition, 104, 19-46. Millikan, R. (2004): Varieties of Meaning: The 2002 Jean Nicod Lectures. Cambridge: MIT Press. Papineau, D. (1993): Philosophical Naturalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Prinz, J. (2002): Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Prinz, J. (2005): The Return of Concept Empiricism. In: Cohen, H. and Lefebvre, C. (eds.): Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science. Oxford: Elsevier. Putnam, H. (1967): Psychological Predicates. In: Capitan, W. and Merrill, D. (eds.): Art, Mind, and Religion. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Putnam, H. (1975): The Meaning of ‘Meaning’. In: Gunderson, K. (ed.): Language, Mind and Knowledge. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 7. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 131-193. Searle, J. (1980): Minds, Brains, and Programs. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 417-457. Spivey, M. (2007): The Continuity of the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wimsatt, W. (2006): Reductionism and its Heuristics: Making Methodological Reductionism Honest. Synthese, 151, 445–475. Wittgenstein, L. (1953): Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (shrink)

Some experimental studies have recently claimed to undermine semantic externalism about natural kind terms. However, it is unclear how philosophical accounts of reference can be experimentally tested. We present two externalistic adaptations of psychological placeholder essentialism, a strict externalist and a hybrid externalist view, which are experimentally testable. We examine Braisby, Franks, and Hampton's (1996) study which claims to undermine externalism, and argue that the study fails in its aims. We conducted two experiments, the results of which undermine internalism and (...) the hybrid theory, and support strict externalism. Our conclusion is that lay speakers' natural kind concepts involve a belief in an external category essence, which determines reference. (shrink)

Dry earth seems to its inhabitants (our intrinsic duplicates) just as earth seems to us, that is, it seems to them as though there are rivers and lakes and a clear, odorless liquid flowing from their faucets. But, in fact, this is an illusion; there is no such liquid anywhere on the planet. I address two objections to externalism concerning the nature of the concept that is expressed by the word 'water' in the mouths of the inhabitants of dry earth. (...) Gabriel Segal presents a dilemma for the externalist concerning the application conditions of the concept, and Paul Boghossian presents a dilemma for the externalist concerning the complexity of the concept. I show that, in both cases, the externalist may occupy the horn of his choice without departing from either the letter or spirit of externalism. (shrink)

Dry earth seems to its inhabitants (our intrinsic duplicates) just as earth seems to us, that is, it seems to them as though there are rivers and lakes and a clear, odorless liquid flowing from their faucets. But, in fact, this is an illusion; there is no such liquid anywhere on the planet. I address two objections to externalism concerning the nature of the concept that is expressed by the word ‘water’ in the mouths of the inhabitants of dry earth. (...) Gabriel Segal presents a dilemma for the externalist concering the application conditions of the concept, and Paul Boghossian presents a dilemma for the externalist concerning the complexity of the concept. I show that, in both cases, the externalist may occupy the horn of his choice without departing from either the letter or spirit of externalism. (shrink)